As a whodunit, writer-director Aaron Katz’s LA-gorgeous story of movie stars (Zoe Kravitz) and their devoted assistants (Lola Kirke) is a bit flimsy-fake — you know, like a movie set — relying as it does on shoddy police work, a couple of glaring coincidences, and a suspect who goes from …
Will Smith plays a man who is haunted by his past: all those years pulling a trigger for the government have taken their toll, to the point where he tells people he’s having trouble looking in a mirror. (Though from his swaggering carriage and bulked-up physique, it’s clear he’s aware …
Will Smith plays a man who is haunted by his past: all those years pulling a trigger for the government have taken their toll, to the point where he tells people he’s having trouble looking in a mirror. (Though from his swaggering carriage and bulked-up physique, it’s clear he’s aware …
Will Smith plays a man who is haunted by his past: all those years pulling a trigger for the government have taken their toll, to the point where he tells people he’s having trouble looking in a mirror. (Though from his swaggering carriage and bulked-up physique, it’s clear he’s aware …
A post-Soviet Russian poet (Vladimir Epifantsev) discovers his own uselessness to a generation that chooses Pepsi, and takes a job at a kiosk, selling condoms and cigarettes to the newly capitalist masses. It isn't long before the world of buyable crap gets to him and he's reading his customers' hands …
Better title: Generation Greenfield. Photographer and documentarian Lauren Greenfield is an anthropologist of American excess, as evidenced by her recent film The Queen of Versailles and by her various deep dives into privileged youth, cosmetic enhancement, and various sorts of striving — beauty pageants, porn stardom, and oh yes, motherhood. …
File under: bravura openings to set the theme. Director Tate Taylor (The Help) has the intestinal fortitude to start this James Brown biopic with the Godfather of Soul in full meltdown: baked, aged, and enraged that someone has taken an unauthorized dump in his building. But when he stops to …
Cultural appropriation shifts from “problematic” to “horrific” in writer-director Jordan Peele’s sharp take on the scary world of stuff white people like — starting with the “total privacy” of isolated country estates, like the one black photographer Chris Washington (Daniel Kaluuya) visits with his white girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) on …
Patima Tungpuchayakul has, to her great credit, made it her mission to find and rescue the thousands of men essentially kidnapped and enslaved by the Thai fishing industry. “Essentially” is a necessary qualifier here, because how exactly the men wind up on the boats — where they are trapped and …
A hot mess of a philosophical cyber-thriller. The hot is provided by Scarlett Johansson as a government agent (but corporate creation) built from a human brain and a synthetic body, the latter often on quasi-display in a shimmering sort of shell casing that she only occasionally uses as digital camouflage. …
An adventure in mundanity that makes excellent use of the tension between those two words. Ain’t Them Bodies Saints writer-director David Lowery reteams with that film’s stars Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara for the story of two lovers whom death doesn’t quite part. How Affleck passes isn’t terribly important; what …
Having recanted her polished Disney decency with two exercises in high-concept sleaze (Sucker Punch, Spring Breakers), Vanessa Hudgens goes for earnest drama (complete with frumpy-grungy appearance) as Apple, the abused daughter of a meth whore (a frightening Rosario Dawson). In rapid succession, Apple escapes her home, meets her (rich, conventional) …
Tate Taylor’s adaptation of Paula Hawkins’ novel (the source is worth mentioning, given the morose chunk of voiceover that opens the proceedings and the appearance of high-octane lines like “she loved you in ways that people only dream of being loved” — this said to a distraught husband immediately after …
After the wild success of The Hunger Games and the slightly less wild success of Divergent, and before the hotly anticipated success of The Maze Runner, they decided to let Jeff Bridges realize his 18-year-old dream of bringing this YA dystopia novel to the screen. That was nice of them …